After a long, arduous process, director Alfonso Cuarón returns with sci-fi epic Gravity, his first feature film since 2006’s fantastic Children Of Men. And those beautiful, long tracking shots in Children Of Men? Oh yes, Gravity has those, thanks in part to Cuarón’s reteaming with awesome cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. We’re hearing the first 17 minutes of Gravity are one unbroken shot.

And then there’s been the hype: chatter about an apparently heavily CGI, 20-minute opening sequence; Guillermo Del Toro calling it 5-years ahead of its time; a 3D shoot that left Clooney hoping he’d never bother with the format again; a product that Bullock said will be “profoundly silent and big and loud and I don’t know how to explain because I have never seen anything like it” and finally, noise from a test screening last year that made certain folks freak out in anticipation. [The Playlist]

Gravity stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney (who replaced Robert Downey Jr and Angelina Jolie) as two astronauts who are on a spacewalk when their shuttle and her crew are destroyed. Cuarón co-wrote the script with his son, Jonás.

Can I just express how awesome it is for a movie to terrify me about something that could actually happen instead of using zombies, invincible serial killers, magic, or other B.S. as a less unsettling stand-in for real, difficult-to-write-about problems like cancer, random violence, soul-crushing daily existence, and occasionally having the snap realization that we’re on a lava-filled rock hurtling through a mind-bogglingly large expanse of what-the-f*ck-is-out-there space?

Gravity finally opens October 4th. Here‘s the music in the trailer (Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt).

I’m interested, but I’m not sure if I would call it “Sci-fi” as everyone is. It’s set in space, yes, but there really aren’t any incredible or fantastic elements at least in the trailer that would classify it as being something that couldn’t happen within the limits of our current technology or scientific understanding. This could really happen, which is what is so appealing. It would be like calling Apollo 13 a Sci-fi movie.

Cuarón’s scenes remind me of a podcast I’d listened to a while back (Radiolab, maybe) where they described a part of the editing process where every time a character blinked, the shot was stopped, and perspective changed to a different view/character/whatever, which tells our brain that it’s ok to blink in that small moment, that we aren’t going to miss anything.

It seems like Cuarón is aware of this, and shoots his movies so that we have to blink against our will.